Dumont: Revisiting 2017's most memorable moments

Here at home, the Canada 150 celebrations culminated in a Canada Day party on Parliament Hill. Of course, us Indigenous people tried to ruin it by putting up a teepee. It's in our nature. We just cannot let Canada have nice things — mostly because we don’t have nice things in our communities, like water, quality housing or education. That tends to make people a tad edgy.

With the election of Donald J. Trump hanging over our heads, the world began 2017 a bit uneasy. Many countries have weathered petty despots in positions of power and survived, but could America, land of the free, proud exporters of democracy, handle it?

After a year, Trump’s approval rating was 38, lower than the last six presidents. In Trump-speak, that’s “higher than any other president, ever!”

I knew this presidency would be a hot mess, but no one could have predicted the “pee-pee” dossier first mentioned in June. It described a video that reportedly had footage of Trump and some Russian sex workers engaging in some pee-fuelled vengeance directed at then-president Obama for being awesome and black, which is clearly a crime in Trump’s world. Whether or not the tape exists, social media seized upon it like it was a life preserver — that night, thousands of tweets mocked the president and his kompromising tape.

Here at home, the Canada 150 celebrations culminated in a Canada Day party on Parliament Hill. Of course, us Indigenous people tried to ruin it by putting up a teepee. It’s in our nature. We just cannot let Canada have nice things — mostly because we don’t have nice things in our communities, like water, quality housing or education. That tends to make people a tad edgy.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau crawled into the teepee to hear the concerns of the activists — but he cheekily wore a Canada 150 pin on his jacket. Indigenous people had the last laugh, though, because now there are pictures of the Prime Minister wearing denim jeans with a denim jacket, a look seldom attempted by anyone except 11-year-old girls and Alabama wedding guests.

This summer there was a solar eclipse. Although I wasn’t that excited — it’s no northern lights, people — I did try to view it. I built a pinhole camera on my coffee break and went outside to look through it. Fortunately, one of my coworkers explained that a sheet of paper with a pinhole in it is not a pinhole camera, it’s a piece of paper. Another, more hysterical co-worker wanted everyone to stay away from the windows as he explained that even the “secondary light” could blind you. For weeks afterwards, he claimed that he had lost all peripheral vision.

Even if you could not get your hands on a pinhole camera, the effects of the eclipse could be seen all around us; the sky was darker than normal and we all felt a sense of foreboding, so we calmed ourselves by taking selfies in the dim light, just like our ancestors.

In September, Trump kept poking the North Korean bear, making up insults for Kim Jong Un, like rocket-man and such. You might be saying, “But you just called him a bear!” Yes, but I’m not a world leader; my words do not have the same consequence. This is a concept that Trump cannot seem to wrap his mind around at all. Kim Jong Un responded by calling Trump a dotard, teaching us all a new word. This message drove Trump to tweet out even more insults from the safety of his crapper. Their back and forth would have almost been entertaining if they didn’t have the power to annihilate everyone on the planet.

While I was smugly enjoying the foibles of the leader to the south, our own dear leader was being investigated. In fact, Trudeau apologized after taking a trip to see his dear friend, the billionaire Aga Khan. The trip and the resulting ethics investigation hurt his brand: the likeable, relateable leader with the great hair. On the other hand, if you thought the wealthy son of a former Prime Minister was relateable, then you might be Ben Mulroney or Ben Harper.

Fortunately, our leader still has his great hair — and his sanity — which is a helluva lot more than the Americans can say.